Welcome to my book blog created 2012 of books I read and review. I exhausted space on my other blog, Pat's Posts. Better to separate my readings from my writings. Eventually I will display my entire library here. I am in the process of moving some reviews from the other blog here as well. The design of this blog has been a work in progress, slowly, bear with me...

MY OTHER BLOG

If you got here because I commented and you were directed to this blog, it is because Blogger will not show both blogs. So you can get to my Pat's Posts, by clicking this link..my miscellany, the first blog while this is just about books.

Thursday, May 30, 2019

The Easter Parade by Richard Yates

Front cover paperback

It is refreshing to just read a nice, plain, simple story I thought after reading this book by the late Richard Yates. I had found it at a sale and it languished on my to be read shelf, so right after Easter this year, I opened it. It was an easy read over only four days, and I thought, "Well wasn't that pleasant, no big drama, a sense of something was going on amongst a few characters, but still no melodramas. Just a nice story." The author was unfamiliar to me but I totally agreed with this Stewart O'Nan quote, "he writes about so average and identifiable, so much like the world we
know” When I read that he is deceased and his books now are seldom found on shelves, I wondered why and realized I perhaps had a treasure. Furtherresearch and in particular the full review by Stewart O'Nan of the Boston Review, summed up Yates as someone who should have been read. He is described as a writers writer but never became popular among readers.

Back cover paperback

"Since his death in 1992, all nine of Richard Yates’s titles have
quietly dropped off the shelves. Once the most vaunted of authors–praised by
Styron and Vonnegut and Robert Stone as the voice of a generation–he seems now
to belong to that august yet sad category, the writer’s writer. Andre Dubus,
who was his student at Iowa, revered him, as does Tobias Wolff, and the jackets
of Yates’s books are adorned with quotes by the likes of Tennessee Williams and
Dorothy Parker, Ann Beattie and Gina Berriault. When authors talk his name pops
up as the American writer we wish more people would read, just as Cormac
McCarthy’s used to. In the acknowledgments section of his novellas, Women
With Men, Richard Ford makes it plain: "I wish to record my debt of
gratitude to the stories and novels of Richard Yates, a writer too little
appreciated."And yet, Yates
doesn’t fit the mold of a writer’s writer. He’s not a linguistic acrobat like Nabokov or a highflying fabulist like Steven Millhauser, not
a uniquely intellectual or obsessive writer the way we think of William Gaddis
or Harold Brodkey. In the era that saw Pynchon, DeLillo and Rushdie make their
names (before storming the bestseller lists), he wrote about the mundane
sadness of domestic life in language that rarely if ever draws attention to
itself. There’s nothing fussy or pretentious about his style. If anything, his
work could be called simple or traditional, conventional, free of the
metafictionalists’ or even the modernists’ tricks. "..."It may be that writers prize Yates because readers haven’t. In a
business that often champions shoddy and false work over true and beautiful
accomplishments, his fate confirms our worst fears and prods us to demand
justice. He’s the most readable and accessible of literary writers...."This novel opens, " Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seems that the trouble began with their parents' divorce. That happened in 1930 when Sarah was nine years old and Emily five. Their mother who encouraged both girls to call her 'Pookie" took them out of New York to a rented house in Tenafly, New Jersey where she thought the schools would be better and where she hoped to launch a career in suburban real estate. It didn't work out--very few of her plans for independence ever did--"Good Reads had this about Easter Parade, which I use as I couldn't have said it better, ",,,,,first
published in 1976, we meet sisters Sarah and Emily Grimes when they are still
the children of divorced parents. We observe the sisters over four decades,
watching them grow into two very different women. Sarah is stable and stalwart,
settling into an unhappy marriage. Emily is precocious and independent,
struggling with one unsatisfactory love affair after another. Richard Yates's
classic novel is about how both women struggle to overcome their tarnished
family's past, and how both finally reach for some semblance of renewal." Overall a 4 ****, no great literary quotes that I will include here from the story, just a good read.

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Open Book

Open Book

Your books

I found this scrap clipping clearing out paperwork, there is no author, I wished I'd written it but I didn't and I don't know who did: "Your books are your autobiography; they map your history, reflect your tastes, hold emotional moments between covers."

My rating system 5 *****

I am using a 5 star rating with 5 being excellent, the best read and 1 marginal....some books may not merit 1 star. Life is too short to waste on uninteresting books...or maybe my reading time is too short, or maybe I'm just too short. But there it is 1 low to 5 high.

I read books

“I am simply a 'book drunkard.' Books have the same irresistible temptation for me that liquor has

Book Drunkard Quote LM Reynolds

When you finish a book

When you finish a book

You are the books you read

You are the books you read

My other blog

This is the link to my other blog, where there are reviews of books I have read prior to 2012 as well as other writings http://patonlinenewtime.blogspot.com/

About Me

This is to record books I have read, sometimes my comments may be useful to others. However I set this blog up for tracking my own reads, and a way to not repurchase something I have already read. That purpose does not always work. I do not belong to any book clubs because I prefer to choose my own books to read and the book clubs I tried did not work out for me. I wanted discussion, about writing, authors, the concepts, etc instead all I heard was, "I liked it" or "I didn't like it" no depth of conversation, so I gave up. I have been a life long reader. I will say in retirement, I do not spend enough time just reading, as I imagined I would. My days are busy and so it is unusual for me to carve out time in the day to read, mostly I read for about half an hour prior to bed. Life is different than I thought it would be. .